Video of the DayFriedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Of course this documentary is predictably PC, but it is interesting to see the places and things associated with Nietzsche’s life.

Related

Related

If you enjoyed this piece, and wish to encourage more like it, give a tip through Paypal. You can earmark your tip directly to the author or translator, or you can put it in a general fund. (Be sure to specify which in the "Add special instructions to seller" box at Paypal.)

2 Comments

Oh, the taboo of Hitler. Just maybe his sister was right. What an evil woman, daring to edit her beloved brother’s work for the evil Nazis. She could not possibly understand it. Only liberals can and call him mad and whatever. Very convenient that. Bad boy, went to a brothel, so deserves it you know. We can dilute what he said and dismiss him for no one really knows what madness is. It is just a term for what one does not understand or want to understand. And the scientists can claim him because he killed God and so really was just an atheist with a father complex. Nowadays they have a pill for that. No thinking required.

One of the ways Nietzsche is neutralized in shows like this one is that he is presented as a sort of Nostradamus type of figure. We’re told he “predicted post-modernism.” That’s where liberals usually stop though in terms of their praise for him. But that’s like saying Shakespeare is great because he wrote Romeo & Juliet…and that’s about it. That modern academics can consider themselves “Nietzschean” while completely ignoring the spirit of his ethics (which is really why he’s obliterating previous epistemology built up by his philosophical and religious predecessors) is beyond me. It’s pretty fraudulent stuff how self-described admirers of Nietzsche can believe in democracy and seemingly go along with a bourgeois sensibility to ensure their invite to the latest faculty cocktail gathering– a repulsive spirit indicative of all the superficial grandstanding that the man himself despised. It certainly represents how the humanities in general have had all of the vitality sucked out them through mass standardization.

His *true* ethical sensibilities are always tip-toed around; and yes, we are told “his realization of ‘the death of God’ drove him mad” or something close to that is often implied (or so it seems to me) as a convenient way of skipping a discussion of the genius of his aristocratic philosophy, altogether. He’s also easy to present out of context because he was so aphoristic.